Business Rules

Practice Writting Business Rules (AND in BPMN) !!!!

• Describe how a company does business
• Describe what a company must enforce
• In the form of constraints or conditions
• Written in normal language
• Owned by the business partners
• Implemented by IT
• Have to be nurtured, protected and managed.
• Make the company more competitive to other companies

• Business rules are decision points in BPMN (activity before a gateway)

Advantage * 4

Consistency: Rules help business make fair & consistent decisions, because human tend to do make varied decisions, business rules keep human factors out of the scope and thus Improve Decision Making

Speed: Using business rules facilitates automatic technical processes that are free of human touch, and that, in turn, removes human involvement which adds time to the process, therefore the process is more efficient and less costly (Cost Reduction).

Types of Business Rules

Definitional:

Defines how the business is run.

Help make business decisions.

Provide answers to questions arising in day-to-day business activity.

Ensure consistency of operational business decisions

Has pattern

It is like the law of business operation, cannot be broken.

Behavioral:

Obligational = business law/policy = can be broken, BUT will receive a response 

Prevent undesirable situations (states) the business deems

Governs all on-going business activities

No pattern

Sources

People: experts and managers who have the expertise in making decisions, when people go, business rules are gone to, so it is better if we get the rules from these people’s head, and reduce the risk to lose expertise

Documentation: law documents and policy documents where rules are defined, long and complicated

Code: dig through code to find out how rules are implemented, can take a long time, better if people keep rules in one place

Business Rule Management System

Provide a unified place to manage business rules.

• If you have 10 subsystems and rules are implemented in each of them individually, it will take forever when changes are needed.
• BRMS is external to our application, which is a good thing.
• If you have a central BRMS, businesspeople can come in and add/remove rules to a repo, IT leverage them and pick from the rules when we deploy them into our system